1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for bagging discrete units of ice produced by associated apparatus.
2. Related Art
One of the more recent developments is U.S. Pat. No. 4,368,608 to Ray which discloses an ice bagger where a measured amount of water is frozen, cubed and dropped directly into bag placed under a chute and which is embodied in the Texas Aim, Inc. Ice Bagger.
Although the Ray apparatus is an advance, it has been found to have a number of serious defects which made the apparatus very labor intensive for upkeep and maintenance.
A large amount of the ice is melted during the defrost cycle. When the ice drops responsive to this defrost cycle, all this water is also dropped into the bag of ice. This creates two additional problems: (1) Some of this water leaks out of the air vent hole in the ice bag and runs down into the bottom of the merchandiser where it freezes--over time, depending on the volume of ice produced, this creates a frozen block of ice that must be cleaned out; and (2) The water freezes the ice cubes together so that the bag of packaged ice is a solid block instead of individual cubes. If the bag fails to open for any reason, the ice can be dropped directly into the merchandiser, requiring clean up. The AIM machine transports all the bags each time to the chute to accept the ice. It is difficult to load the bags and they can be easily loaded backwards. If the ice maker false cycles and makes less than a full harvest, then the bag of ice produced is less than the amount printed on the bag. There is no flexibility as to size of the bag of ice since this is controlled by the cuber. The AIM bagger drops the filled bag of ice to the rear of the merchandiser where they may stack improperly causing premature indication of a full merchandiser and machine shut down.
It is an advantage of the present invention that the ice does not drop directly into a bag from the ice making component of the combination. It is a feature of the present invention that the run off water is collected away from the bag and removed from the machine. It is a further advantage of the present invention that false or short cycling of the ice maker will not effect the load delivered to the bag. It is a feature of the present invention that different size or weights of bags of ice may be produced. It is a particular feature of the present invention that bags are more easily loaded and only in the correct alignment. A further advantage of the present invention is that it utilizes the bag storage space more completely. It is a particular feature of the present that the stacking of the bagged ice is more efficiently carried out to achieve balanced distribution of the bagged ice in the merchandiser, thus reducing the likelihood of premature shut down of the system. These and other advantages and features of the present apparatus will become apparent from the following.